hknamida Wrote:He refers to fluency in Japanese, not JLPT mastery. He even wrote a long, rant-esque article about how JLPT is useless.

Still, I'd say there's definitely a use for textbooks, especially when you're just starting out. However, I don't think you'll ever become fluent using only textbooks.

I know what he meant, but I still consider JLPT1 to be close to fluency. I mean a high mark in JLPT1. I read his post and I had the same views as him before he even wrote it. I have never been interested in JLPT and would never take it unless I had to for whatever reason. It's the only benchmark I can point to though.

Also, I agree 100% you can't become fluent through textbooks alone and I doubt anyone thinks it is possible. Dismissing them completely just seems wrong, though.

Yeah, that was cool hearing Khatz talk about his method. He seems like a cool guy and definitely has heaps of insights into the language learning process. The interviewer comes across as kind of a jerk though.

I'm don't think Khatz is completely rejecting textbooks, after all he does endorse certain books such as RTK, and a couple of other books such as the one on grammar. I think he is saying though, that you textbooks should only form a small portion of the overall language learning process. I think the interview was a bit misleading on that point.

Anyway, good interview.

The interviewer and Khatz are actually friends, I've heard.

Am I the only guy who doesn't mind him?

alyks Wrote:The interviewer and Khatz are actually friends, I've heard.

Am I the only guy who doesn't mind him?

He would be fine if he didn't drop the F bomb every other sentence. People who swear a lot tend to come across as un-educated and immature.

CaLeDee Wrote:

alyks Wrote:The interviewer and Khatz are actually friends, I've heard.

Am I the only guy who doesn't mind him?

He would be fine if he didn't drop the F bomb every other sentence. People who swear a lot tend to come across as un-educated and immature.

I have to agree with CaLeDee. He isn't totally awful like everyone else is insinuating; however, his lack of manners leaves something to be desired.

One big factor is that AJATT method is mostly about a large amount of audio input. I really think this is a major reason why it works. Most people using textbooks do not get hours of audio reinforcement. If a textbook came with twelve hours of authentic, level appropriate audio, and you listened to it constantly, then it would work like AJATT. I suspect the people who became fluent with textbooks also watched movies and listened to people talking a lot. Listening is often the lost skill in Japanese classes too. Being able to listen accurately allows you to answer well.

I appreciate the guy making/uploading the videos, but he is so annoying!

"Even this camera is in Japanese, cuz I bought it in Japan"

Props to Khatzumoto

Khatz came across as very intelligent while the interviewer just sounded like a drunk frat boy. He did put the video out for everyone to see and so deserves to be cut a little slack though.

I think the video does a disservice to Khatz. He's clearly an intelligent, articulate guy, but the background noise, swearing by the interviewer, and lack of order and progression in the interviewer's questions don't permit Khatz to present his ideas in a fashion that will appeal to many people. If someone asked me about AJATT, I would direct him/her to the website and pray that he/she didn't watch the Youtube video first.

That said, I agree with bodhisamaya that the interviewer could be cut some slack for actually trying to do something to spread the gospel...

Ji_suss Wrote:I think the video does a disservice to Khatz. He's clearly an intelligent, articulate guy, but the background noise, swearing by the interviewer, and lack of order and progression in the interviewer's questions don't permit Khatz to present his ideas in a fashion that will appeal to many people. If someone asked me about AJATT, I would direct him/her to the website and pray that he/she didn't watch the Youtube video first.

That said, I agree with bodhisamaya that the interviewer could be cut some slack for actually trying to do something to spread the gospel...

And as you post this, Khatz posts this: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...in-english

Erubey Wrote:I appreciate the guy making/uploading the videos, but he is so annoying!

"Even this camera is in Japanese, cuz I bought it in Japan"

Props to Khatzumoto

ok it wasnt just me who got realllly annoyed when i heard that LOL!!!

CaLeDee Wrote:I've been trying to keep things on in the background but it really does distract me. I can concentrate better without noise. Same with sleeping.. can't sleep if there's any noise.

A thing about the videos I don't really get. He says using textbooks you can't become fluent. If so then how come in the JLPT results pages there are people in every country passing JLPT1 every year? I'm sure they are more than likely using textbooks and most probably haven't ever heard of AJATT either.

I attempted just surrounding myself in Japanese and only reading Japanese even if it was above my level. I just didn't like it. I prefer structure and the feel of progression. Also, learning new grammar without seeing an explanation of the rules it follows just slows you down.. You can read it once and understand it rather than just trying to figure it out from context.

For example:
昨日図書館へ行ったら、先生に会いました。
昨日図書館へ行って、先生に会いました。

The first one has an underlying feeling that you didn't expect to see the teacher. The other doesn't. I wouldn't be able to guess that without doing a load of たら sentences in this context, which is a waste of time if you can just read the explanation when you first use it.

I think Khatz was pointing out that from his experience (stating he had to review resumes from people that passed JLPT1) that those that passed JLPT1 were not fluent. Someone who's literate and fluent can pass JLPT1, but someone that passes JLPT1 is not necessarily literate or fluent (but very knowledgeable make no mistake). Hey, I looked at the JLPT1 exams, and some parts I can guess the correct answer with 100% accuracy. I say guess as I don't know the sentence, but I know what's not the answer. I know how to take a test, but I'm not fluent.

For your example, I never went over loads of tara and te sentences. I think maybe 5 or 10 examples are in my SRS specifically for that area. The other times, you just run into them from reading or listening input. Use Tae Kim's sentences.

I like the feeling of having read about 20 pages of manga today over the feeling of going over twenty pages of textbook.

Yo, Nuke, of course you forgot to mention the load of japanese you listened.
This kind of grammar construction is so easy to get from context. You dont need them in your sentences at all. Just hear enough japanese and you'll know it.

alyks Wrote:I like the feeling of having read about 20 pages of manga today over the feeling of going over twenty pages of textbook.

You'd learn a lot more from 20 pages of a textbook than you would from any manga.

CaLeDee Wrote:

alyks Wrote:I like the feeling of having read about 20 pages of manga today over the feeling of going over twenty pages of textbook.

You'd learn a lot more from 20 pages of a textbook than you would from any manga.

Ok, we're splitting hairs here. That 20 pages from the textbook most like is only CONCEPTS presented in ENGLISH with a few examples in JAPANESE.

Here's what happens with me: I (try to) do active studying for about an hour or two a day. That's me reviewing material in an SRS, or getting new material in the SRS. That material can be sample sentences that highlight the grammar point, or a new word. Sometimes it's me adding a bit more to the Onyomi movie method (New one today for ケン which will be South Park "Oh my God, they killed KENny!"). Maybe it's adding a new kanji. Who cares, as it's something new.

Then it's my day of listening or reading stuff in Japanese. Now, I don't know about you. But it's cool looking over a Manga and RIGHT THERE is a word you just learned that day or maybe yesterday. It wasn't planned, didn't come up on a SRS schedule. It was a moment of incidental circumstance. Same sh..tuff was happening when learning Kanji. I'd see the kanji I just learned when walking around. It's a freaking turn-on that what I'm doing feels to be working.

I'll argue that the studying makes the INPUT method more efficient. But without the INPUT, then the studying is useless. Try it out. Down load a manga or j-drama and just flip through it. If you're in the kanji phase, look for stuff you know and try to put context to the story. If you're in studying phase, listen or look for words you learned, or a grammar concept you get (hmm, はしい、つもり、て、ください、そして、から、). If you never studied and only did input, you'll learn maybe in 10 years. If you only studied and never inputted, you'll be the guys that can't order dinner at a restaurant. With both, since they COMPLEMENT each other, you get progression that faster than either in isolation.

If reading 20 pages of Manga gives you the motivation to study 20 more pages of textbooks, then I call that 40 pages of usefulness. By the way, that Manga, it's literature so it is studying (shhh, don't tell anyone their fun activity is helping them learn, keep a secret between us).

Also, though Alyks didn't say it, he's likely looking up each word he does not know while reading a manga. Now that's active studying, and having fun at the same time. It's also something I don't do (we all do our own thing).

I have a few gigabytes of manga and I know that from reading through them, when I come onto a new word or Kanji I need to stop what I'm doing and go find out what it means. Then, most likely I will just continue reading and forget that word later. This takes even longer to do if there is no furigana, and I really don't consider looking up a word in a dictionary to be studying. Studying would be to put it into an SRS and review it or write it out a lot.

With grammar concepts it's even worse if you are JUST using manga. If you stumble onto a new concept you can only guess at it's meaning; you might well be wrong, and if you are right then there's probably a nuance you're missing out on.

I don't think about input or output, I just do what I do and if I feel it's not helpful I will stop doing it and do something that feels like it's helping me learn. I started taking lessons on edufire last week with a pretty nice teacher, so that's helping my speaking a lot. I listen to more Japanese in any given day than I do English + watched and listened to Japanese for 3 years before even starting to study Japanese. I am very much used to how Japanese sounds. I started studying it because I love how it sounds so that's a big thing for me. I would say my normal day is pretty much focused around doing Japanese so I do more hours studying I think.

For me, learning from textbooks is a fun thing, because I know I am understanding more about how Japanese works. Reading manga/watching anime feels like I am taking a break and not really studying or learning anything. Maybe that's just me though.

Edit: I have a question so rather than make new post I'll ask here.

When studying with an SRS I find it much harder to go from English to Japanese than J-E. I feel when I am just doing J-E or J-moreJ it is wasting time because I'm just reading something that I already know. Going from E-J it forces me to remember the right particles and grammar.

So my SRS looks like this when doing J-E:

教室で日本語で話すことになっています。
(small text)ことになっている

I either read this a few times or type it out on a text pad. If I really don't know it I will write it out. However just reading the Japanese, it's too easy. I don't see the benefit in it.

The English is like this:

You are supposed to speak Japanese in the classroom.
(small text)ことになっている

Now going from this to the Japanese and getting it all right without any mistakes in particles/words is harder. It feels like I have to try. But when I think about it, it's like I am just remembering what the sentence was. It's also a translation which can be subjective. There's more than 1 way to get it right. This is a dilemma to me. The Japanese alone is too easy if I have already learned it, and the E-J feels like jamming 2 parts of a puzzle together than aren't supposed to go together.

I feel if it is all Japanese and I am just putting sentences that I have learned into the SRS, with additional info in the answer field then am I really forcing it into my memory? Because I would just hit the 3rd button every time in Anki because it's too easy like this.

Textbooks alone suck. However, textbooks with manga, dramas, TV, etc. are very good. Similarly, manga alone sucks. Variety of contexts and repetition are key. Variety of contexts and repetition are key.

phauna Wrote:Textbooks alone suck. However, textbooks with manga, dramas, TV, etc. are very good. Similarly, manga alone sucks. Variety of contexts and repetition are key. Variety of contexts and repetition are key.

Yea you are 100% right. I could not imagine what it would be like, learning a language through only books without knowing how it sounds and how it flows. I came into Japanese after years of listening to it but I'm sure there are others that only started from books. I don't know how that would feel or if it would have any affect on studying, and would be interested to hear of others who did do it this way. I just took it for granted that I was familiar with spoken Japanese, but now if I think if I were to just jump into another language that I have never listened to and am not familiar with.. that would be a completely different story. If that were the case then yes, I can definitely agree you should be listening to it all the time.

We have 2 totaly diverging opinions here.

I personaly think that a dictionary of grammar is uself. In the sense that when you find something you do not understand when you are reading (real) japanese from a manga and go search for the explanation. Specially when you are a begginer.
I crawled trought textbooks and pimsleur in the beggining and it was very worthful.

But it will come a time that the english and explanations will only hinder your progress. That time you should throw the textbook away and focus on real japanese.
Japanese from textbooks is more unrealistic than japanese from manga.

Hey guys, I go to sleep and you guys go insane.

I have a couple wrenches to throw into what everybody is saying:

1. Reading > looking up words > words go into the SRS.

2. The benefit of reading Japanese is not exclusive to vocabulary building.

3. Little Japanese babies do not need a grammar book or textbook.

Now to help out CaLeDee:

CaLeDee Wrote:Now going from this to the Japanese and getting it all right without any mistakes in particles/words is harder. It feels like I have to try. But when I think about it, it's like I am just remembering what the sentence was. It's also a translation which can be subjective. There's more than 1 way to get it right. This is a dilemma to me. The Japanese alone is too easy if I have already learned it, and the E-J feels like jamming 2 parts of a puzzle together than aren't supposed to go together.

I feel if it is all Japanese and I am just putting sentences that I have learned into the SRS, with additional info in the answer field then am I really forcing it into my memory? Because I would just hit the 3rd button every time in Anki because it's too easy like this.

It's because of these problems that a lot of people here don't go E-J.

If you want to find out if you're remembering the phrases, you would have to go out and speak. So go on skype or something and find somebody Japanese. When you want to say something, think the English phrase you want to say, then remember the sentence for that phrase, then say it. Do you see the problem here?

We're not trying to remember phrases when we go J->J/E. Were trying to learn how to understand the language and the SRS just makes sure we remember our understanding. We want to learn how to speak and what to say through lots of context and seeing how natives do it. We want to learn how to use a word naturally, not by forcing ourselves to remember phrases. Because if we can understand everything in Japanese like a native could, it would then be very easy to start speaking. It would be very easy for the same reason I could pick up a Texan accent by going to Texas, or how I could pickup ghetto slang by hanging out with people who talk like that. This isn't just an accent, it's word choice and expressions. We spend a lot of time surrounded by a way of speaking, we just pick it up. But to do that, we have to be able to understand everything first.

So figure out if you're for input or for output first. Because by doing this, it doesn't seem like you're quite sure.

CaLeDee Wrote:I attempted just surrounding myself in Japanese and only reading Japanese even if it was above my level. I just didn't like it. I prefer structure and the feel of progression. Also, learning new grammar without seeing an explanation of the rules it follows just slows you down.. You can read it once and understand it rather than just trying to figure it out from context.

For example:
昨日図書館へ行ったら、先生に会いました。
昨日図書館へ行って、先生に会いました。

The first one has an underlying feeling that you didn't expect to see the teacher. The other doesn't. I wouldn't be able to guess that without doing a load of たら sentences in this context, which is a waste of time if you can just read the explanation when you first use it.

I understand feeling the need for structure like this - and the sense of seeing your progression and knowing where you are at all times is reassuring. But the more I've slipped into the AJATT method, the more I become a disciple.

(I'm not singling you out, CaLeDee, just using your comments as an example)

The human brain is wired to learn language, and that doesn't change just because we are no longer children. Yes, I do have some Japanese grammar books that I refer to at times - but I also learn a lot of grammar just by reading and watching movies. You see a new structure in a manga and think, hmm, I wonder what that meant. Then you come across it later, then again in a few days, and somehow your brain figures it out, it connects the dots and you go "Ahh, got it, I see." I've learned lots of Japanese grammar this way, and I'm not always sure how I would translate the thoughts or concepts into English - and you know what? It doesn't matter. I have no need to translate. I'm not a translator, and I don't have a teacher saying "please translate this sentence into English." If I understand the Japanese sentence, that's all that counts. Japanese people don't need to translate their sentences into English in order to understand them. They just understand them - in Japanese. Constantly translating is a crutch, not a goal.

In addition, grammar and vocabulary learned by absorbing it through manga and movies is learned in a very different, natural way. It gives you a feel for the natural flow and way of expressing yourself in a language that you can never learn from a textbook. Sure, you feel lost at timea, you want to grab onto something when you're reading a manga that you can barely understand - yet something is happening in your brain, it's figuring out the language - and when your brain does it on it's own, the result is much more natural and powerful than anything you can achieve through a class or with a book.

timcampbell Wrote:Japanese people don't need to translate their sentences into English in order to understand them. They just understand them - in Japanese.

Sometimes the most obvious things are the hardest to understand.

My computer started eating itself.. Had to reformat -.-

Mentat, I agree that there will come a time when looking for English explanations will hinder progress. I don't think I am yet at that level, which may be one of the reasons I currently hold the views I do.

Alyks, I can see how that can definitely work. Putting words from manga into an SRS can be very helpful for being able to understand more of that medium. I would guess there's a big difference between textbook vocabulary and manga. I might make a separate Anki deck and start doing that.

I can't say I can go along with the baby comparison though. Babies brains are like sponges and absorb everything in a very natural way. This changes as the brain matures and new connections become harder to form. Heisig even said something along the lines of this. That's why his method works so well for non-Japanese, we see the structure that builds up the kanji and that makes it much much easier for us. I think living in Japan would of course make it easier to learn the language. I can't seem to get into the illusion of being immersed in Japanese, even when I'm surrounded by it. Maybe my level isn't high enough, I can't have full conversations in my head in Japanese yet.

I am aware that we shouldn't be trying to memorize phrases, that's much too rigid. E-J also feels much too rigid but I do it because it forces me to get the right particles and word structure. If I am making mistakes in typing it out, I don't feel I should just ignore those mistakes. If I am just doing J-J, I read the sentence and say it a few times but that doesn't exactly make it roll off my tongue if I wanna recall a similar structure later, even if the sentence is extremely easy to read and understand. I'm not the type of person that talks to others over Skype, which is more a personality thing than anything else. I can see the benefits of it though. I think what I mostly want is to understand as much as possible, before output. I don't want to leave output and just come to it at the end, that's is why I'll continue taking the lessons which is great for output.

Tim I can understand what you are saying but I think it would be more relevant if I were a higher level. I can't take context of grammar just by listening quite yet. There's too many words I don't know usually. When the time comes that I feel depending on English explanations for unfamiliar structures starts feeling like a crutch, then I will drop it. I'm not there yet and don't feel comfortable at just guessing right now. Translating all the time doesn't seem natural to me either, however one thing I remember my ex-gf saying made me wonder about it. She is Korean but completely fluent in English and pretty much sounds American, but she said she hates when we had an argument because she can't translate it in her head fast enough to reply and just gives up. If you listen to her, you would mistake her for being American, but she said she translates it in her head always? Even I at a much lower level rarely translate in my head. Maybe it depends on the person, I don't know really but thought that was interesting, even though I don't want to have to do that.

Saying this though, I am actually wanting to get into translating and possibly subtitling. I think many subtitles never capture the essence of the Japanese meaning and Englishify(WTF?) the translation way too much. I'd like to become a good translator and find a good balance for translations that remain true to their original meaning and also sound at least almost natural in their translation. That's a long time goal though =)

CaLeDee Wrote:I can't say I can go along with the baby comparison though. Babies brains are like sponges and absorb everything in a very natural way. This changes as the brain matures and new connections become harder to form.

Source?